Brian Pierce is thankful for the life he leads now.

The 31-year-old from Lake City, Minn., is married, the father of three with a home in the suburbs and works as a law clerk for Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Harriet Lansing. He drafts legal opinions and converses daily with some of the finest legal minds in the state. He's also a computer whiz -- and a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society -- who helped design an online law library used by legal scholars and human rights researchers throughout the world.

Eight years ago, however, his home was a one-man jail cell he shared with two other fellows in Lowndes County, Ga. It seemed then like just another pit stop along a pathetic road of drug abuse and small-time crime.

Pierce's transformation from juvenile delinquent and two-time state convict to college and law school graduate should be an inspiration to anyone. But his story also is a reminder that rehabilitation and prison-based education are just as important as punishment in getting the upper hand on our crime problem. That's a message that often seems lost in all the tough talk that dominates criminal justice policy debates today.

In 1995, more money ($926 million) was earmarked for erecting prison buildings than for higher education buildings, according to a report released last year by the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. A year earlier, Congress eliminated Pell Grant scholarship money for inmates.

A national study released in October by the New York City-based Center on Crime, Communities and Culture concluded that prison-based education programs dramatically reduce recidivism rates, save public money over time, and are among the most effective and efficient crime prevention tools.

The study, which noted that at least 25 states have cut back more than 340 prison education programs in the past decade, found that inmates with at least two years of college had a 10 percent rearrest rate, compared with the national rate of 60 percent. Former inmates with at least a high school diploma reoffended at a much lower rate than high school dropouts.

``From what I've seen, what we are doing is warehousing people (in prisons) and treating them like waste,'' Pierce says. ``People have to be taught valuable skills that are marketable. If we let people out and they haven't anything to market, they go back to the same place where everyone is in the same boat and they lose any shred of hope and begin not to care. It's important for people to know that people can change. . . .''

Pierce was adopted as a toddler by a deeply religious couple who ran a motel on U.S. 61 facing Lake Pepin. For reasons he says he cannot explain, Pierce experimented with drugs during a church-sponsored trip to Glasgow, Scotland, when he was 12. He sniffed glue with a bunch of pot-chewing punk rocker types he befriended at a youth center during the trip.

He returned home with an affinity for drugs and a misfit attitude that quickly got him into trouble. He was sent to the juvenile facility in Red Wing after a gas station attendant took seriously his threat to rob the place with a gun and called the police. There would be four more trips to Red Wing before his 18th birthday.

Pierce then graduated to crack cocaine and burglary. He was sentenced to 38 months in the St. Cloud reformatory on a third-degree burglary charge. Pierce watched television, ate three square meals a day and could readily get drugs if he wanted them, he says.

``The only thing I couldn't get was a woman,'' he says. ``The only people you interacted with were the inmates. And all they wanted to talk about was crime and drug use. . . .''

But Pierce knew he was intelligent. Taking advantage of a Pell Grant, he took courses in both computers and human relations. In his first quarter he earned a 4.0 grade-point average, just before his release. The courses planted a seed but didn't exactly take root right away.

A few months later, Pierce was back in St. Cloud on a drug possession charge. He jumped parole after his next release and took up with a group of outcasts selling ``Dunn E-Z,'' a homemade cleaner, to small businesses throughout the country.

``We mixed this stuff up in 55-gallon drums in the back of a beat-up old bus,'' Pierce recalls. ``We were probably violating every EPA law in the country.''

A stop in Atlanta resulted in a romance and whirlwind courtship with a woman who had two young sons. They married 21 days after they met. The newlyweds, struggling with drug dependency and money problems, were tossed into jail a few months later for trying to buy merchandise with a stolen credit card.

``You can say anything you want about Minnesota prisons, but they are at least humane,'' Pierce says. ``But the conditions down there (in Georgia) were unbelievable.''

He shared a cell with a 6-foot-8-inch, 245-pound car thief and another inmate with a broken leg. He feared that as a three-time offender, he would ``spend the rest of my life in a chain gang'' under Georgia's habitual offender law.

A dedicated defense lawyer and a compassionate judge arranged to have the couple serve 75 days in jail, placed on probation and banished from the southern district of Georgia for five years.

Pierce voluntarily returned to Minnesota to serve out the 30 days left from his parole violation. More conscious now of his responsibilities as a husband and father, he decided to give the straight life a shot, landing a job as a painter of apartment complexes in Rochester.

``I was so proud when I got my first paycheck,'' he says.

Things looked good until a fire broke out inside a building where Pierce was working. He fell down a flight of stairs while helping residents flee the building and injured his knee. He was taken to the University of Minnesota for major reconstructive surgery.

``What am I going to do now?'' he fretted. ``I can't paint anymore and I have a criminal record.''

Recalling how empowered he felt after taking the prison college courses, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. In his first quarter, his wife gave birth to a daughter with a potentially fatal pneumonia-like disease. The girl, now 6, was put on an experimental-drug program and appears to be doing well, Pierce says.

In 1994, he graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in criminology. Then, aided by scholarships and grants, he enrolled in the University of Minnesota Law School.

David Weissbrodt, a law professor, was looking for students with knowledge of computers to help him build a Web site. Pierce quickly learned HTML and other programming language and coding formats over a weekend. The result of his work with Weissbrodt was the University of Minnesota's online Human Rights Library, now used by scholars in more than 100 countries and recognized as the best source of human rights resource materials on the Internet.

``He was absolutely indispensable; the engine of it,'' says Weissbrodt, the library's co-director. ``One can only admire someone who has overcome so many difficulties. He's a remarkable person who has turned his life around, and I think very highly of him.''

Pierce graduated from law school on May 10, 1997. He gives much credit to Lansing for having the courage to hire him for a one-year clerkship last summer. He counts Judge R.A. (Jim) Randall, one of the original members of the 15-year-old appellate court, among his friends and mentors. At Randall's urging, Pierce has spoken to groups of state prison inmates about his life and how to leave prison with marketable skills.

``He is not only a wonderful example but as humble and unassuming as he is intelligent,'' says Randall, who is among many encouraging Pierce to apply to take the state bar examination. ``I know that when his application is reviewed, his character will stand out.''

Pierce also wants to pursue a career in corrections administration. He has seen what works and what doesn't. He says he foresees a bleak future if the United States continues its record pace of incarcerating more people than any other country in the world -- and eventually releasing the vast majority without skills or training.

``It's painful to talk about my past and to sit here and now and say that I used to break into people's homes and steal from them,'' says Pierce, his voice cracking. ``It's hard -- the publicity might even hurt me. But people should know that locking people up without hope isn't the answer. Education should be mandatory. There would be no option. If you don't comply, it's solitary, 24 hours a day. . . .''